St Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra
Concert Hall, Hong Kong Cultural Centre
Continues tonight at Cultural Centre and tomorrow at Sha Tin Town Hall, both with different programmes.
Serious collectors of classical music recordings all know about the legacy of the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra under legendary conductor Eugeny (or Yevgeny) Mravinsky from 1938 until his death in 1988.
Mravinsky's successor as chief conductor of this group - now called the St Petersburg Philharmonic - is Yuri Temirkanov. He has brought the orchestra to Hong Kong to perform in three concerts starting from last night, where it displayed great orchestral virtuosity and sheer grandeur.
In the first half of the concert, Vladimir Feltsman was the soloist in Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No 1. His playing exhibited strength and vitality with many shades of tone colours. His touch was always solid and yet very agile, enabling him to go through the technically demanding concerto as if taking a cheerful evening stroll - perhaps too cheerful. One could, indeed, ask for more earnestness and less dallying around the emotional messages. Rapport between orchestra and soloist was sensitive and the dialogues between them were often exciting.